The Lord of the Isles

David Drake's Lord of the Isles series is heroic fantasy, following the adventures of four main characters: Garric, his sister Sharina^[1], and their loyal friends Cashel the shepherd and Cashel's twin sister Ilna. Garric has a claim to the throne of the Isles, and the ghost of the last true king advising him (though most of the advice is on the order of: "Don't do what I did; it was a disaster."); Cashel and Ilna have unusual magical abilities; and Sharina is tough, smart, and has a talent for making friends who're Badass enough to help with any threats she can't quite handle on her own. Other key characters include Lady Liane, whose merchant father left her with an information network she's turned into Garric's intelligence service, and Tenoctris the wizard.

The magical forces wizards draw upon have a thousand-year cycle; currently, they're reaching a peak, so even the weakest wizard can do mighty things. Unfortunately, most wizards don't understand these forces properly, and tend to do a lot of damage with the side effects of their spells. The last time the forces peaked, the Kingdom of the Isles shattered into squabbling successor states. Tenoctris is a survivor from that disaster, who used her magic to escape by flinging herself to the start of the present peak. She's not a very powerful wizard. But ... she does understand the forces of magic, and her spells do what she intends them to do, no more or less -- making her an absolutely vital resource.

I'd intended to use Atlantis as a setting. Tom [Doherty, Tor's publisher] pointed out that none of the series which had done really well had real-world settings; and OK, Atlantis wasn't exactly real, but-- I don't generally argue with a publisher, especially when (as in this case) he's one of the best marketing people in the business. I set my novel in The Isles, which are Not Atlantis.

—David Drake, from his website

The books are:

• Lord of the Isles (1997).
• Queen of Demons (1998).
• Servant of the Dragon (1999)
• Mistress of the Catacombs (2001)
• Goddess of the Ice Realm (2003)
• Master of the Cauldron (2004)
• The Fortress of Glass (2006)
• The Mirror of Worlds (2007)
• The Gods Return (2008)
  • The last three books are considered a trilogy, The Crown of the Isles, within the series.

Tropes used in The Lord of the Isles include:

• A God Am I: Sharina, Cashel, and Ilna. Weirdly, they become the gods they worshiped.
• Anvilicious: Possibly the frequent assertions of the superiority of the Barca's Hamlet folk.
• The Atoner: Nonnus, in the first book; Ilna in the others.
• Author Appeal: Garric, Sharina, and Liane are fond of and often quote the work of ancient poets -- expies of the Classical poets David Drake likes to read. "Rigal" is Homer, "Celondre" is Horace, etc.
• Badass: All four of the main characters, just for starters; most of their friends as well. Nine-year-old Merota shows signs of being a badass in training (not quite a Little Miss Badass yet) when worshippers of evil try to sacrifice her:

Most children would have screamed. Merota, Ilna's ward, waited with a closed mouth and eyes as hard as agates.

• Badass Army: The Blood Eagles, the royal bodyguard; to join, you have to have shown heroism in the regular army.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Cashel can kill demons with his bare hands. It's hard to make him angry enough to want to hurt you. It's also very stupid.
• Brainless Beauty: According to the man who raised Sharina, her birth father Count Niard fit this. "Not a bad fellow, Niard, though we used to joke that every time he had a second thought in the same day, one of his ears fell off ... and he still had both ears."
• Crystal Prison
• The Determinator: Pretty much everyone, but special mention goes to Tenoctris (physically frail) and Liane (highly educated, but not in anything suitable to her rough and tumble lifestyle).
• Eternal English: Time Travel takes place in several of the stories, usually involving transitions of thousands of years. The language remains essentially unchanged, although it may be accented, and once a character used a word that didn't exist in the society she'd been thrown into. Possibly justified because A Wizard Did It, literally -- except that a couple of times, the wizard who did it wouldn't have wanted the time traveler to be able to communicate.
• Generation Xerox: Averted. Carus was in love with a woman whose looks and personality were identical to Ilna's, but Garric merely regards Ilna as a good friend.
• Gentle Giant: Cashel.
• Good Adultery, Bad Adultery: One of each in the backstory. Garric's mother was married to Sharina's father; Garric's father is married to Sharina's mother -- and that's four parents, not two.
• Half-Human Hybrid: The first book reveals that Cashel and Ilna's mother was an unidentified member of The Fair Folk, and this is evidently the source of their odd powers. She's later named: Queen Mab.
• Identical Grandson: Garric's visions of Carus show that the physical resemblance is very strong, despite there being a thousand years between them.
• Nightmare Fuel: Happens several times over the series, the most blatant being the tale of Cerix, a wizard who opened a window into another plane, but closed the portal with his legs still inside! Now his legs are in a place where demons tear at them every day ... and he can still feel it....
• Oblivious to Love: Cashel is utterly devoted to Sharina. In the first two books, other beautiful girls fall in love with him ... and he doesn't notice. He's a little more aware of it happening in some of the subsequent books, not that it changes his feelings.
• OOC Is Serious Business: Sharina thinks this in The Fortress of Glass when Cashel shouts that he's going to literally tear a certain wizard's head off. But Cashel could do it, and he's got very good reason....
• Our Dragons Are Different: The Dragon in Servant of the Dragon is an ancient and very powerful wizard of a human-sized Lizard Folk species. His people have all been dead for thousands of years, and he's been dead even longer -- but he's so powerful that when evil wizards use his mummified body for some of their foul magic, his spirit reaches into the far future and recruits a "servant" to destroy his corpse. When he promises this servant that she and her friends will benefit from her serving him, he means all her friends, including one she hadn't met at the time of the promise -- something of a twist on Exact Words....
• Pirate: Chalcus (reformed).
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: Garric and Sharina, who drive their bodyguards insane by being brave and energetic; also highly intelligent, but see again "brave" -- the sort of royalty who're worth protecting, but very hard to protect. Those two know they're the ones with the best chance of fixing things, and they're going to fix them, no matter how dangerous it is. Garric's ancestor Carus was a warrior king, and it shows.
• Spirit Advisor: King Carus, to Garric.
• The Spymaster: Liane. Doesn't fit the "cold and dour" characterization at all; she's young, beautiful, and was described by someone inclined to dislike her as "calm, steadfast, and kind, with a spirit that could never be broken so long as life was there to sustain it."
• Squishy Wizard: Tenoctris is seventy years old, and a scholar rather than an athlete all her life.
• Trapped by Mountain Lions: At least two out of the four main characters are Trapped by Mountain Lions for a significant portion of each book, after the first novel. Fridge Brilliance suggests that because of this, when three characters visit The Underworld in a book called The Gods Return, this is more than yet another trippy side trip.
• Unlucky Childhood Friend: Ilna, toward Garric.
• Victorious Childhood Friend: Cashel, toward Sharina.
• Wham! Episode: The Fortress of Glass. In two different ways, one of them heart-wrenching.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Often.
• Wild Magic: Not precisely, but Cashel's power doesn't always act by his volition, although it usually does what he'd want it to do if he knew it could do that. A prime example is when his magic altered the names on a written contract to reflect Cashel's belief that two of the people signing it were cheating the others. He'd had no idea that was going to happen.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Averted. Flung a thousand years into the future, Garric is told history says he died fighting a rebellious noble and the kingdom collapsed. When he gets back, he finds Sharina (and Carus, wearing Garric's body) managed to talk that particular rebel over to their side.

1. ↑ Supposedly his twin, but actually no blood relation